Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Verbatim

When RobertPondiscio wrote “How
to Get a Big Vocabulary,” I knew it was just a matter of time
before my defenses would weaken, and I would have to start spouting off about
the beauty of language, Latin, etymology, and classical roots. I can’t help it.
I get excited about these things. I teach Latin, English, and writing, and my
happy place lies at the nexus of these subjects.

Just when I
thought it was safe to take a break from grading my students’ writing
assessments and see what’s happening on the internet, Core Knowledge blog
reader John Webster had the nerve to ask specifically for a Latin
teacher’s opinion on the value of Latin, and Robert had the unmitigated gall to
publicly provoke me into a response to John’s comment.

@Robert (comment 30). Here in
Minnesota, I know of several public schools that offer – require – Latin.
They’re called charter schools, and all of them are also Core Knowledge
schools. Yet another reason why some alleged supporters of Core Knowledge who
oppose all charter schools are in no practical sense real friends of Core
Knowledge. My two kids, 9th and 7th grades, study Latin and do the obligatory
grumbling about having to learn a “dead” language. I rely on the authority of
teachers I respect that Latin helps in developing literacy and vocabulary
skills, but I’ve never read anything addressed to laypeople why this is so.
Anyone know of any articles/essays that explain the value of Latin, or can any Latin
teachers in the CK blog audience explain this value in a practical,
meat-and-potatoes way? Comment by John Webster — December 27, 2012 @ 8:07
pm

Before I get all in a twist about the word “value” as it
relates to anything I teach, (Latin valere, to be strong, vigorous, in good
health, to have force) let me begin with the low-hanging
statistical fruit, all thanks to Bolchazy-Carducci,
the publishers of the textbook, Latin for the New Millennium:

1. Studies performed by the
Educational Testing Services show that students of Latin outperform all other
students on the verbal portion of the SAT.

2. In the District of Columbia,
elementary school students who studied Latin developed reading skills that were
five months ahead of those who studied no foreign language and four months
ahead of those who studied French or Spanish. Two years earlier, the same
students had been excluded from foreign language classes because of substandard
reading performance.

3. In Philadelphia, students in
the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades received 15 to 20 minutes of daily
instruction in Latin for one year. The performance of the Latin students was
one full year higher on the Vocabulary Subtest of the Iowa Tests of Basic
Skills (ITBS) than the performance of matched control students who had not
studied Latin.

4. Sixth-grade students in
Indianapolis who studied Latin for 30 minutes each day for five months advanced
nine months in their math problem solving abilities. In addition, the students
exhibited the following advances in other areas:

· Eight
months in world knowledge
· One year in reading
· Thirteen months in language
· Four months in spelling
· Five months in science
· Seven months in social studies

But the fun part – the “value” – in learning Latin has
nothing to do with these statistics or test scores. It lies in the evolution
of our language, the stories revealed through etymology, the history of
our culture articulated through the words we preserve and the words we discard.

As Robert’s post points out, a big vocabulary does not
come from sheer memorization. Anyone who has ever been subjected to an
11th-hour SAT prep course knows that. It comes from a deeper understanding of
word origins and repeated exposure to novel words through reading. If I know
that the Latin acer means “sharp,” I can deduce that “acid” has a
sharp taste, an “acute” angle is sharp, “acrid” is a sharp smell, and an
“acerbic” person has a sharp wit.

I am all for the memorization of vocabulary; in fact, my
school teaches vocabulary using a lovely series called Vocabulary from Classical Roots and my
students memorize their share of vocabulary lists. However, if we want our
students to achieve true depth and breadth of vocabulary, it’s worth spending
some time among the Romans. A working knowledge of Latin is worth more than the
weight of its word roots. It is an exercise in reverse-engineering our own
language in order to understand how all the parts fit together to create a
whole.

And as for the greatly exaggerated rumors of Latin’s
death? Latin teachers squall and writhe in horror when confronted with this
rumor as evidence of Latin’s obsolescence, but I couldn’t care less. In
arguing for the relevance and necessity for the continued study of Latin, I
call on Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer at The Guardian.

The most frequent charge laid against the door
of Latin – aside from the absurd accusation of elitism – is that it is useless.
Why not learn Mandarin, people ask, or Russian or French? For me the pleasure
of Latin is precisely because – aside from the
points sketched above - it is “useless.” Latin doesn’t help to
turn out factory-made mini-consumers fit for a globalised 21st-century society.
It helps create curious, intellectually rigorous kids with a rich interior
world, people who have the tools to see our world as it really is because they
have encountered and imaginatively experienced another that is so like and so
very unlike our own.

I couldn’t agree more. My students can “amo, amas, amat,
amamus, amatis, amant” with the best of them, but they can do even better than
that. They can tell their friends Amy and Amanda where their names come from.
They understand how amare meandered north and became amour. They
can become enamored, have inamorata, wax rhapsodic about their first
paramour. They will know what Catullus meant when he lamented that odi et amo,
and take solace in Virgil’s observation that omnia vincit amor.

Latin is alive and well in my classroom, thank goodness.
My mother likes to remind me that she was the one who forced me to take Latin
in seventh grade, and like John Webster’s kids, I moaned and groaned about
having to study a dead and hopelessly irrelevant language. But thank goodness
for my mother’s stubborn insistence. My students are far more accomplished
readers, writers and students of the world for their years spent among the
Romans.

What a lovely piece! I would just like to add the survey given by Oxford University to those who had fired their graduates as to how they were performing in the workplace. Imagine: the highest accolades came back for Classics majors! Our discipline teaches students to work with masses of arbitrary information and to think critically about it. Just like life!

In addition, more recently, Harvard and Princeton have been spreading the word that the highest proportion of people getting into medical and law school are Classics and mathematics majors. They, too, are the ones who outperform the rest once in the programs!

What more could one ask? Well, the lovely myths, history, art, and architecture of the Romans and Greeks!

Interesting thoughts, indeed! I took Latin, Spanish and French in school and enjoyed them all and was an A student, but I don't speak any of them today and remember very little.

We're monolingual parents raising a fluent as a native trilingual/triliterate child ( Mandarin, Spanish, English) as we travel the world and she wants to learn French next. Since most Spaniards mistake her for a native speaker, learning French should be quite easy with some immersion and study.

I always thought I'd teach her Latin, but now, I am wondering if there is a need? What is a Latin teachers thoughts on that? How much value is Latin to someone who is fluent in Spanish? Would it be fairly easy since her brain has been wired for a romance language from birth?

I am a big believer in MIT Linguist Pinker's quote: "One free lunch in the world is to learn another language in early childhood."

I have to agree with Soultravelers3 - ANY deep language study accomplishes these tasks. Latin is often not a success exactly because many elements of the Latin curriculum are actually English-language-learning exercises in disguise. At least in a Spanish class, everyone agrees that the emphasis should be on communicating in Spanish (hearing, listening, reading, writing)... while Latin classes are often conducted entirely in English, with limited opportunities for communication (students often never do free writing of any kind in Latin, for example, and do not carry on conversations in Latin). Don't get me wrong - I LOVE LATIN (I used to be a Latin teacher, and my Bestiaria Latina blog is my main hobby even now)... but whenever someone asks me what language their children should study in school, I always recommend that they do a living language FIRST, and only afterwards pursue the study of a dead language. It's easier to learn to "let go of English" by learning a living language. Many Latin students never learn to let go of English at all, esp. if they are in a Latin class where the main activity is translating Latin into English, as is still the case in many Latin classrooms, esp. in college.

I think even sadder still is that students never "let go of English" in many Spanish, French, Russian, and other what you would call "living" language classes. I don't think it's any easier or harder to get a true language learning experience in any particular language. The only issue is the commitment of the teacher of the particular language to a true language experience. It matters not if the teacher presides over Latin or Spanish or what-have-you.

I have to agree, but I wonder whether Latin also has an effect on math scores. I have a PhD in the Classics and an MA in Economics and am a professional economist, and I often say that my Latin skills - how to look at an entire problem, how to form expectations, how to research, and when to use different methodologies and tests - made me better at math.

I'm not alone in this - I often meet professional mathematicians and statisticians who studied Classics at some point, and most have said to me that people do a disservice when they say you're either a "language" or a "mathematics" person: the two are very close and use the same skill sets, especially Latin and Greek.

That and the fact that I think Latin is beautiful is why my kids will take Latin.

Latin and math have been correlated in studies, but I am watching The Hunt for Red October with my two sons and can't find them just now. Latin certainly helps kids focus on all the details, in fact I have written about this in the past - that Latin requires an attention to detail unrivaled by any subject save for math.

I really would like to be a Middle School teacher and I would like to know everything about teaching Middle School. Please tell me the pros and cons about teaching in general. Also if you teach at a private school, you don't have to teach at a private school though